The Poetry of Clifton by Lucille Clifton

First published:Good Times, 1969; Good News About the Earth, 1972; An Ordinary Woman, 1974; Two-Headed Woman, 1980; Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980, 1987; Next: New Poems, 1987; Ten Oxherding Pictures, 1989; Quilting: Poems, 1987-1990, 1991; The Book of Light, 1993; The Terrible Stories, 1996; Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, 2000; Mercy, 2004

Type of work: Poetry

Clifton’s Family History

Lucille Clifton is a distinguished African American poet and a recipient of the National Book Award, numerous poetry and literary prizes, and honorary degrees from five colleges and universities. Her first collection of poems was published during the year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and in the year of her father’s death. She was thirty-three years old, and her mother had died eleven years earlier, at the age of forty-four. In the book’s title poem, she admonishes readers to “think about the good times.” The tough spirit of that practical wisdom—accepting, forgiving, determined, and celebratory—forms the predominant tone of her early works.

The voice that speaks this wisdom throughout Clifton’s poetry is the voice of an empowered and empowering woman, specifically a black woman whose identity has been molded by memories within a family that was given its genesis by American slavery. The family’s female progenitor, Caroline Sayle, was a midwife who was born eight years before her enslavement and who died long after the emancipation. Familial memories and Clifton’s art drive her in her poetry to sing about freedom, symbolized by Africa, and about a future symbolized especially by daughters and mothers yet to be born. Clifton’s poetry may be seen as an African American “Song of Myself” (1855): While she suffers grievous losses, her story echoes Walt Whitman’s affirmation in that nineteenth century poem that “there is really no death,/ And if ever there was it led forward life.”

The members of Clifton’s family play significant roles in her poetry, and she has presented details and moving commentary on her family history in Generations: A Memoir (1976). The poet’s father, Samuel Louis Sayles, Sr., recounted that his great-grandmother was brought into slavery from Dahomey, West Africa, in 1822, when she was eight years old. She walked in a coffle to Virginia, where she was sold away from her mother to the Donald family, who named her Caroline. When she was a young woman, she was purchased by a neighboring plantation owner, who gave her in marriage to his slave Sam Louis Sale (1777-1860). (After the emancipation, the family changed its name from Sale to Sayle in order to distinguish themselves from their former owners.) She lived until 1910, becoming a powerful figure in the region. She was a highly respected midwife to black mothers and white mothers alike and had at least six children of her own.

One of Caroline Sayle’s daughters, Lucille (Lucy), bore a son, Gene Sayle, whose father was Harvey Nichols, a married carpetbagger. Lucy killed Nichols with a rifle and was hanged. Gene and his wife, Georgia, had four children, including Clifton’s father, Samuel (who added the s to the end of the family name), and her Aunt Lucille. Samuel’s first wife died at age twenty-one, leaving him with their infant daughter, Josephine. He then married Thelma Moore, with whom he had a daughter, Thelma Lucille (the poet, born in 1936) and a son, Samuel, Jr. Lucille married Fred Clifton, with whom she parented a family of four daughters and two sons; Thelma Moore Sayles died at age forty-four, one month before the birth of her first grandchild.

A Poetics of Family and Gender

While raising her family, Clifton became a writer of children’s books and poety. Many of her book titles suggest awareness of the lives of women, and indeed womanhood is a major presence in her art. As she wrote in 1987, “this is the tale/ i keep on telling/ trying to get it right.” Her poems portray a long “line/ of black and going on women,” who reject and rediscover their blackness, endure cold, make mistakes, grieve, blame and dream, hunger and feed, bleed, break and break through, love and defend, “trust the Gods,” expend their bodies, and perform with daily magic the making of families and homes. Although individuals sometimes fail or are destroyed, together they are the survivors through whom black America keeps persevering. They “know how long and strong life is” and they know “what to do.” In many poems, the history and fate of the family is presented in the form of a mother-daughter dialectic of the same but different self. To the mother, the daughter is “my more than me.” The daughter “puts on a dress called woman” but does not forget.

Lucyis the history ofher girlsare the place wherelucywas going

The good and the bad times in the lives of families are associated with men also. Men have the power to “murder it or/ marry it.” Fathers may be frightening and haunting, may have to be forgiven their debts, but often they also love their families and provide for them. Men are gardeners who plant and who bloom in their own ways. The stunning beauty of black sons causes people to ask, “What is the meaning of this?” Black men suffer the annihilating power of racism, and Clifton’s poems show some who waste to nothing, but more “walk manly” and “don’t stumble/ even in the lion’s den.” They bless blackness with the beauty of their ordinary comings and goings. Some become national leaders, imprisoned or assassinated, as a black man named Jesus brought the promise that “Men will be gods/ if they want it.”

Clifton’s father was a griot, or storyteller, who taught her the power of history; her husband brought a saving and triumphant wholeness to her life and family history. In her poem “the message of fred clifton,” Lucille’s husband teaches from his fatal illness that “the only mercy/ is memory,/ . . . the only hell/ is regret.” Clifton’s relationship with her father is ambiguous. She refers to childhood abuse in several poems, and the implication is that she suffered this abuse from her father. In “moonchild” (2000), she writes of her girlish longings and of her unspoken relationship with her father when her girlfriends ask “who is teaching you (to kiss)?” In “shapeshifter poems” (1988), she asks “who is there to protect her from/ from the hands of the father.”

In the title poem of The Terrible Stories (1996), Clifton asks of her mother—whom she otherwise idealizes—“they are supposed to know everything/ our mothers what did she know/ when did she know it.” The poet’s relationship with her brother is also fraught. Clifton’s brother died from unnamed causes; in one poem, he reflects in “heaven” as he looks down on her: “’she was my sister,’/ I feel him say,/ ’even when she was right, she was wrong.’” Her relationships with the men in her life, other than her husband, seem to cause her both physical and psychological pain. She has stated how difficult these poems were to write but also how necessary they were as a means for Clifton to give voice to other victims of abuse.

Memory and History

Regret is sometimes expressed in Clifton’s writing, perhaps because memory has been such a strong feature of her artistry. She writes in Generations, “Who remembers the names of the slaves? Only the children of slaves.” The bones of the African American poet, she says, remember the soul of the African homeland, just as the name Lucille recalls the ancestors of her African bloodline. Clifton calls herself a “two-headed woman” who looks both outward and inward; while looking back along the way that her people and family have come, she also looks ahead to the promise of constant renewal. History, then, is a garden ripe with living and cherishing memory, as in the exchange of recollections while rocking on the porch or in the giving and regiving of names.

Related to memory, naming is a feature of Clifton’s understanding of her art, for in the act of naming the essential realities of persons are released: “we are lost from the field/ of flowers, we become/ a field of flowers.” The job of the poet, Clifton explains in “the making of poems,” is to try to give true names and to accept the inevitable failures (or half successes) of a being of flesh: The rightful names, the true identities, of persons and things exist in the realm of pure spirit beyond life, while poems are made of “the blood that clots on your tongue.” Nevertheless, as Clifton suggests in “my dream about time,” without these attempts, persons would face the nightmare of a world for which they had no language, like a room full of clocks that all “strike/ NO.”

Clifton’s art demands that she speak plainly and directly of the spiritual meaning and value of ordinary human experience. Clifton herself has overcome whatever racist stereotyping she has experienced in the African American community. Often, though, the whites whom she presents in poems are representative of those persons whom she has met or observed who are blinded by color prejudice, and much of American culture seems to her to reflect their weaknesses. She suggests, for example, that white New Englanders might view their rural landscape as a sign of a long past, but without responding to it as regenerative history. Therefore they become exploitative or, at best, careless, so that “the land is in ruins/ no magic, no anything.”

This attitude toward history on the part of white Americans denies for Clifton the extent to which their living history includes the stories of the Native American Trail of Tears and of the Middle Passage that brought African slaves to America. The white men and women in those stories have faces that black people, too, need to forget. In her early collections, whites are depicted as spiritually and socially underdeveloped, pitiable creatures. They are lost souls who would not know what to do in truly hard times. The ways of white men are the ways of death; they kill their own trees, cities, and even children (“Kent State”). To Clifton, the resulting fear and loneliness of their alienation in time seems like the “final Europe” of the mind.

Africa, in contrast, stands for life unfettered by slavery and undistorted by a preoccupation with racism. In such a life, persons grow into the selves of their natural design and responsible inclination, demonstrating respect for all humans and all species of life. It is “the life thing in us/ that will not let us die.” The other name of that place is love. In Clifton’s later poems, slavery changes the holiness of life into a misery of existence, as slaves are not protected by Jesus but instead left to suffer. This attitude of racism continues into the twentieth century: Clifton reflects in “Memphis” that although she is “northern born,” the Mississippi River and the loss of civil rights activists Medgar Evers, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney are “so many questions” in which she will “float or drown.”

The Dahomey women from whom Clifton is descended were warrior women who represent power and promise. To be descended from them is to know that one is free, even within the “temporary thing” of slavery; it is to know that one is under historical orders to fight for the truth and that one has the resources to carry on that struggle until the promised victory. It is also to know that to be a woman is to be the vessel of the magical power of the life force itself. As Clifton writes in the poem “female,” “there is an amazon in us/ she is the secret we do not/ have to learn./ . . . birth is our birthright.”

Lucille means “light,” and ten poems at the end of Two-Headed Woman (1980) tell of “the light that came to lucille clifton” and the voices of her ancestors that populated that light. Hearing them, in a room that was empty except for the poet, was an extraordinary experience of a kind that lent itself to sympathetic misinterpretation as madness. It shattered the poet’s old verities and radically altered her perspective, yet, like the Zen enlightenment of satori, in its full effect it was as natural and ordinary as walking becomes for those who once were lame.

In “speaking of loss,” Clifton says that she is “left with plain hands and/ nothing to give you but poems.” She would suffer more losses, but the song of herself that began in the 1960’s has continued to expand into a song beyond herself, just as the daughter begins in the mother but lives beyond her mother’s identity and life. In Clifton’s later works, Blessing the Boats (2000) and TheTerrible Stories, she writes about life-changing events, in particular her struggle with breast cancer. Her poetry is graphic in the depiction of her changed body and the fear she battles as the cancer returns. These are poems of survival. She uses spare language without constraints of punctuation or capitalization to express her themes, including dreams and biblical imagery. In some of the poems, she uses the animal imagery of a fox who waits outside her door with terrible stories to tell. She writes of seeing the fox “next night again/ then next then next/ she sits in her safe shadow/ silent as my skin bleeds/ into long bright flags/ of fur.” Sometimes, she speaks in the voice of mythic or biblical characters such as Leda, Lazarus, or Lot’s wife. These later poems show an evolution from an emphasis on women’s issues and racism to more universal themes.

Clifton’s great-great-grandmother Caroline said to her daughter, also named Lucille, “Get what you want, you from Dahomey women.” What Clifton’s poems want, get, and give is life—the mysterious power that living offers to all who will accept its conditions with tough good humor and who will assert its truths.

Bibliography

Clifton, Lucille. “A Simple Language.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. A statement about being a black woman poet.

Lazer, Hank. “Blackness Blessed: The Writings of Lucille Clifton.” The Southern Review 25, no. 3 (July, 1989): 760-770. Because the primary purpose of Clifton’s poetry is to help African Americans to know themselves, her uses of language fuse political and aesthetic concerns.

McCluskey, Audrey T. “Tell the Good News: A View of the Works of Lucille Clifton.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. Notes that in her poetry and children’s books, Clifton writes with realism and the strength to say “yes” to life.

Madhubuti, Haki. “Lucille Clifton: Warm Water, Greased Legs, and Dangerous Poetry.” In Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983. An interpretation by noted African American poet of the importance of Clifton’s poetry for African Americans.

Rushing, Andrea Benton. “Lucille Clifton: A Changing Voice for Changing Times.” In Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century, edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985. The major influence on Clifton’s poetry was the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s, with its emphasis upon political, sexual, and spiritual liberation, black speech and music, the intuited truths of black experience, and a black audience. Clifton has found her own voice in writing about women’s issues, the psychic tensions in the complex lives of modern women, her family heritage, and her religious experience.

Scarupa, Harriet Jackson. “Lucille Clifton: Making the World ‘Poem-Up’.” Ms. 5, no. 4 (October, 1976): 118, 120, 123. A visit to Clifton’s home reveals the relationship between her life experiences and themes in her poetry.